It’s almost difficult to slot the latest Danny Boyle horror instalment beside legacy sequels. Yes, it’s a long-awaited sequel of a rotting franchise, but there is no sense of reinvigorating the old or rehashing any updated storylines here. The third installment of the 28 movies comes in at about twenty-two years after the original and while it shares much in common with stories like Fallout or The Village (read: Running Out of Time), it pivots from a speedy sprint away from the infected to a slow walk into humanity.

It’s been fewer than thirty years since the rage virus ravaged parts of the UK, and a colony of survivors have set up a gated village on an island in the Scottish Highlands. They are a quarantined zone, living in a pocket world cut off from the rest of the planet which has moved on from the pandemic. The people of this area have regressed to the likes of pioneers in almost a primal retraction to medieval villagers. Like the greatest of zombie features, it taps into the fantasy of a world where the only worry is survival, this one without technology or AI, none of our politics or economic worry, just the early goal of returning from war and joining industry. Here, young Spike (Alfie Williams) lives with his seasoned father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and ill mother (Jodie Comer). Spike is of a generation who has never seen beyond the walls of the fortified village but is forced to learn some real-world lessons when the pre-teen is taken by his father on his first visit to the mainland. There, Spike encounters the infected and is forced to defend his life with a quiver of arrows and his father’s paternal instincts. Disenfranchised and spooked by his ordeal and his father’s version of recovery, the young boy decides to visit the mainland again, this time only with his ill mother looking to pivot from being a soldier and hunter to a saviour and protector. Framing the rest like a road trip, 28 Years Later becomes a somber and tender story of a young boy choosing his own version of manhood. One who is forced to do so in place abandoned by the world and where fear is the only thing keeping people alive.

It’s a surprising turn for a sequel to films known for their high-octane scares. The fast-transforming and fast-moving zombies of this universe function to increase the tension and leave it at a lingering hum even during the quietest moments. But instead of making bigger, scarier, more monstrous infected (or instead of only doing that) Danny Boyle and Alex Garland (director and writer, respectively) chose to examine the fallout of such a pandemic and war, comparing Spike and his father to the sorts of men made by wars and global crises. The 1903 poem, “Boots,”- which was also used hauntingly and effectively in the trailer- about the Boer War is used early in the film. Throughout, there are interjections of scenes of other historical wars and soldiers. 28 Years Later is effectively an examination of a child learning manhood in a world that needs a specific version of it from him and choosing to forge his own path. Having spent most of his life under his father’s tutelage, his viewpoint is changed when he encounters a soldier, a doctor, an apparent cult leader, and versions of men who can teach him something different about who he can choose to be. The sum of it becomes a sweet tale of growth that imagines the weight carried by those on the front lines of or left behind by a crisis.

Stylistically, it’s a marvel what Boyle was able to do with a 2025 instalment of a franchise known for the aesthetic crafted in the early 2000s. Yes, he used the iPhone camera with some technology boosters, but the design and appearance also create a visual throughline. Out of the gate with a haunting cold open of children crying while watching Teletubbies, the movie is sprayed with a UK punk aesthetic. The movie doesn’t quite smell bad, but you sense that it’s all-over musty. The dizzying and frenetic edits keep the movie feeling like the guerilla blood fests you remember from 2003 and 2007, but it still fills the borders of a modern silver screen.

Where the zombie pandemic fantasy has often been about a world without modern stresses, 28 Years Later is coming on the heels of a real global pandemic that saw us retaining modern stresses which would eventually become exacerbated. It’s a tall order to examine such a thing, and perhaps why we’ve not seen any “world comes together to fight the evil,” zombie movies since 2019. Boyle and Garland’s story, instead, imagines the tears in such a fantasy, positing a world where we might regress into the likes of the Trojans or the Vikings, where instead of effectively working together to save the world, we’d send young men to the front lines and expect them to trade their lives for a version of manhood that supports someone’s idea of the greater good.

28 Years Later hits theaters June 20th, 2025